Rationale

Many applications use process information, including production scheduling,
process planning, workflow, business process reengineering, simulation,
process realization process modeling, and project management. There are
at least two problems with the way all applications typically represent
process information:

They use their own internal representations, therefore communication
between them, a growing need for industry, is nearly impossible
without some kind of translator.

The meaning of the representation is captured informally, in
documentation and example, so little automated assistance can be
given to the process designer.

The
goals of PSL are to create a process representation that:

is common to all manufacturing applications, generic enough to
be decoupled from any given application, and robust enough to
represent the necessary process information for any given
application.

addresses the “runtime” level of processes, to
capture the intended effect of process languages in a
computer-manipulable way.

The benefits of the representation are:

Facilitating communication between the various applications
because they would all “speak the same language.”
Companies and departments are not constrained to using the same
or similar software packages, or introduce a new learning curve
to one of the organizations that possibly does not have that
package. The companies can use their native software package that
are “PSL compliant” and then
export files in the common representation to be read by the
partner company.

Providing automated assistance for process development by
defining the semantics of process languages in a
computer-manipulable way. For example, many businesses have
rules and policies that their processes are supposed to follow.
However, the representation of these typically do not enable
tools to check whether they are consistent. PSL represents rules
about processes in the same way as the processes themselves, and
uses a formalism that supports automated reasoning. Tools can
translate business rules and processes to PSL to check where
business processes are not following policies and rules.